I've gradually blundered upon a number of useful pdflatex command line options from questions in this forum, but not all of these are documented (specifically the useful -file-line-error parameter). My command line now includes the following "goodies"

Note that the command line options depend on the distribution. The TeX Live binaries support a different set than MiKTeX, and that's just the two main distributions. However, these both seem to support the different spelling used by the other distribution.
–
Martin Scharrer♦May 28 '12 at 17:45